Just to give you all an idea...

Just to give you all an idea of how hard working on computers can still be some times, my good friend Steph came to me today complaining about how her computer wouldn't boot.

Well, I put the hard drive from that in my desktop as a slave, and then my computer wouldn't boot.

In fact, her drive really wanted to be master and wouldn't relinquish control of the computer to my hard drive, no matter how I configured it.

So I had to play with jumpers. But I don't have laptop jumpers around. So instead I used speaker cable (pulling a single strand out at a time) to create a connection on the jumpers. I'm losing them all the time - but they still work thankfully.

So I can get it to boot and recognize a cd-r, my hard drive, and Steph's hard drive - so I downloaded Knoppix (let me tell you, it's a lifesaver) and I'm booting linux on that to get it to recognize her disk.

Until I realize that Knoppix hates NTFS. In fact, I can't blame it.

So I have to use Partition Magic to convert NTFS to Win 32, to copy her files onto my hard drive.

So the break down of hacks:
1. Using speaker wire strands as hard drive jumpers
2. Booting from knoppix
3. Converting my machine's second partition to Fat32 to be able to copy files onto it

Slowly but surely it seems to be working...

EDIT: the drive seems to be deteroriating while I pull files down. Maybe it's overheating? I'll try again in the morning. I've never, ever been this frustrated working on a computer issue